{"id":17243,"date":"2026-04-21T20:39:17","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T20:39:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/?p=17243"},"modified":"2026-04-22T01:42:42","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T01:42:42","slug":"a-25k-revenue-drop-made-us-more-profitable-what-my-q1-review-taught-me-about-my-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/a-25k-revenue-drop-made-us-more-profitable-what-my-q1-review-taught-me-about-my-business\/","title":{"rendered":"A $25K Revenue Drop Made Us More Profitable?! What My Q1 Review Taught Me About My Business"},"content":{"rendered":"    <div class=\"zm-post-first-section mb-24\">\n        <div class=\"first-section-img-wrapper\">\n            <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-content\/themes\/zm-theme\/assets\/images\/first-section-img.png\" alt=\"first-section-img\" width=\"40px\">\n        <\/div>\n        <h3 class=\"zm-post-first-section-title mb-10 w-80 w-md-100\">Brought to you by expert maid service owners<\/h3>\n        <div class=\"zm-post-first-section-text-wrapper fs-16 mb-10\">\n            <div>\n                <i class=\"ph-bold ph-check text-primary\"><\/i>\n            <\/div>\n            <div>\n                <div class=\"zm-post-first-section-text\">\n                    <strong>\n                        Tips and advice shared here, have helped us grow our own maid services.\n                    <\/strong>\n                    With eight current and former cleaning business owners in our team, including our CEO and founder Amar, we know the maid service industry inside and out.\n                <\/div>\n            <\/div>\n        <\/div>\n        <div class=\"zm-post-first-section-text-wrapper fs-16 mb-10\">\n            <div>\n                <i class=\"ph-bold ph-check text-primary\"><\/i>\n            <\/div>\n            <div>\n                <div class=\"zm-post-first-section-text\">\n                    <strong>\n                        We partner with amazing leaders in the cleaning industry like Debbie Sardone,\n                    <\/strong>\n                    Angela Brown, Courtney Wisely and Chris Schwab and more, to provide you with the latest industry insights.\n                <\/div>\n            <\/div>\n        <\/div>\n        <div class=\"zm-post-first-section-text-wrapper fs-16 mb-10\">\n            <div>\n                <i class=\"ph-bold ph-check text-primary\"><\/i>\n            <\/div>\n            <div>\n                <div class=\"zm-post-first-section-text\">\n                    <strong>\n                        We\u2019ve built the easiest-to-use scheduling software, built specifically for maid service owners!\n                    <\/strong>\n                    <a class=\"text-primary2 text-decoration-underline\" href=\"https:\/\/zenmaid.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Check out ZenMaid<\/a>\n                <\/div>\n            <\/div>\n        <\/div>\n    <\/div>\n    \n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify wp-embed-aspect-21-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"Spotify Embed: #132: A $25K Revenue Drop Made Us More Profitable?! What My Q1 Review Taught Me About My Business\" style=\"border-radius: 12px\" width=\"100%\" height=\"152\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/episode\/42pUraYw9lWe56W4fvlY10?si=ea71347f2dec4ba8&amp;utm_source=oembed\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Listen on: <a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/132-a-%2425k-revenue-drop-made-us-more-profitable\/id1791590022?i=1000762731000\">Apple Podcasts<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/episode\/42pUraYw9lWe56W4fvlY10?si=ea71347f2dec4ba8\">Spotify<\/a>, or <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/RsJtZSVsr_8?si=WUNPe4z-OLa-zPa6\">YouTube<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Filthy Rich Cleaners \u2014 E132: A $25K Revenue Drop Made Us More Profitable?! My Q1 Review\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/RsJtZSVsr_8?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-1\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Introduction<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Hello everyone, welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host Stephanie from Serene Clean, and I am so excited about this week&#8217;s solo episode because we are going to be going into my quarter one \u2014 am I from Boston? Hey Cheryl and Nicole \u2014 my quarter one financial and business review that I did for Serene Clean this past week. I presented this information to my management team and I want to share with all of my lovely listeners what I learned, what gaps I&#8217;ve discovered recently because of this analysis that we still have to learn and understand to continue to grow and evolve the business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Truly, doing this data analysis via Claude specifically over the past several months \u2014 starting with the end of last year, which I went over fully in episode 103 of the podcast \u2014 if you&#8217;re interested in my 2025 overview and what I learned there, head back to episode 103. We&#8217;ll link that down below. But this is just continuing to evolve and grow. It&#8217;s not like I just do a certain amount of analysis on the data and then that&#8217;s it. I&#8217;m still learning. I&#8217;m still growing every single month. I am picking up new things and new insights because of all of this analysis, and it really has been such a game changer and metamorphosis for me as the leader of the company, but also for my entire management team. It has given us such confidence and clarity because we know and feel competent, and we understand what the heck is going on in Serene Clean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And if you don&#8217;t know who I am that is babbling at you \u2014 my name is Stephanie. I own a cleaning business in rural Western Wisconsin that has three locations. I opened it when I was 22 years old. We just hit our seven-year anniversary, actually. Shout out to my entire team. Seven years of business we hit on April 1st of this year, and I&#8217;m doing a fabulous cleaning giveaway. If you guys need some inspiration on how to do celebrations in your business, check out Serene Clean&#8217;s Facebook page \u2014 we&#8217;re doing a really popping-off cleaning giveaway. So I&#8217;ve grown the business to multiple locations and I have run it remotely from Savannah, Georgia for nearly three and a half years now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I swear this past quarter has just been really revolutionary because of the data and because of the numbers \u2014 helping it dictate our goals, giving us clarity over what we need to fix and tweak. We&#8217;ve just made so many improvements and I&#8217;m really, really proud of what we&#8217;ve been able to accomplish this quarter. It&#8217;s truly spectacular.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But the crazy thing about quarter one of 2026 is it is down. Revenue is down $25,000 compared to quarter one of 2025, yet our profit was up 53%. Those things seem like they would not go together whatsoever \u2014 we actually at the end of the day made more money than quarter one last year, but we brought in significantly less. And I want to go into everything related to how that can be, why it is, and why I still feel so positive despite the fact that our revenue is down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s because I understand why it&#8217;s down and we are actively doing stuff every single month to make it like it&#8217;s eradicated, that problem is gone, and we are solving it. We are just making progress every single month. I&#8217;m just feeling really, really confident because we are catching things before they tumble out of control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The thing about 2025 is quarter one was the only good month of the year financially. It was the only good month. January and February of last year were the only months that we positively had monthly recurring revenue added. Every single other month of the year last year, we were losing monthly recurring revenue. And I didn&#8217;t know that because we weren&#8217;t tracking it. I knew it was bad. I didn&#8217;t know how bad it was. I didn&#8217;t know what exactly the numbers were so that I could actually feel bolstered to change it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I&#8217;m very proud to say that for quarter one of 2026, we have had positive MRR every single month. And in fact, we hit our goal. In episode 103, I told you that our goal was on average to add $1,500 of monthly recurring revenue every single month of 2026. And on average, we have done that. February was lower, but the total quarterly goal was to add $4,500 and we hit that. I&#8217;m super duper proud. We were right on the money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s very cool now that we&#8217;re actually tracking the goal and tracking our progress and looking at it every single day. It&#8217;s amazing what happens when you actually start to look at the numbers and track your goals and be really on it. Nicole and Amar are putting out a wonderful newsletter \u2014 it might have already gone out by now \u2014 and we&#8217;re talking about this whole MRR concept. We actually include a screenshot of my monthly recurring revenue change log that we have added in order to easily track this. If that&#8217;s something you guys want to see, mention it down below. You need to be subscribed to our newsletter. It&#8217;s completely free. You don&#8217;t need to be a ZenMaid customer. We&#8217;ll link it down below on how you can subscribe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because monthly recurring revenue is literally the end-all be-all of everything I care about now. It&#8217;s the one truth of whether we&#8217;re making the progress that we need to make and not being distracted by just top-line revenue. Are we adding that monthly recurring, and what&#8217;s getting taken away? It&#8217;s just been so dang clarifying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-2\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">How We&#8217;re Running the Data<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> So all of that to be said, yeah, we are down $25,000 in total revenue compared to last year&#8217;s first quarter \u2014 but it&#8217;s okay. And I&#8217;m going to explain exactly what happened. It was actually, honestly, one of the best things to happen to us, I think. Now looking back and understanding everything, this data analysis actually made me understand last year&#8217;s quarter one so fully. And it opened up some blind spots even further on certain topics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I don&#8217;t know if you guys are this way, but I totally nerd out on something \u2014 even if it&#8217;s from a while ago \u2014 when the data starts to tell you something. It really is very exciting to me. Let me know if you guys geek out about stuff like that too, because I certainly do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So to give you guys context on the reporting: this is not something that I was doing in any capacity prior to the end of last year. This is the first time I&#8217;m doing a quarterly report. I&#8217;m actually doing a monthly CEO report where I&#8217;m Clauding pretty much all of the different data sources I possibly can. I&#8217;m talking ZenMaid appointments, I&#8217;m talking Gusto payroll data, staffing and how much the staff are making, our ClickUp data and sales reporting, our income by customer summary from QuickBooks, income by revenue type \u2014 whether that&#8217;s commercial and the frequency. I&#8217;m giving it just so much stuff. And the beautiful thing about AI for data analysis is it takes all the information and allows us to start seeing patterns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What was really cool was this past Wednesday I had a multiple-hour meeting with my management team, just going through this full report that I created. We started asking questions because there were still some things that were not so clear \u2014 like, what about this? What about this? And the beautiful thing is I literally just had Claude pulled up in that chat and started asking it: well, why is this this way? What other information do you need from us? Having a conversation back and forth. And that made us all think very critically, and we all walked away from that meeting with full clarity as to what is occurring \u2014 and also for us to realize: shit, we&#8217;re about to hit a wall if we don&#8217;t get on hiring right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I might be babbling a little bit in this one because I&#8217;m just so excited about the information that we found and the fact that we&#8217;re catching the problem right now. As of today, quarter one was really, really good because we had capacity in ways that we previously had not, despite our low staff count compared to what you would think we would need. We had a lot of schedule availability so we could get first-time cleans in. But what we have realized is we&#8217;re about to hit the wall of availability and we need to hire immediately \u2014 way faster than I thought, or that any of us thought, for several reasons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We did have somebody quit without notice last Saturday. Spoiler alert: this is why we do group interviews. Spoiler alert too: this is why we have Hannah, my field development and quality assurance specialist. Half her job is being available. That&#8217;s why she doesn&#8217;t have any regular clients \u2014 so we weren&#8217;t having to cancel on anybody. Hannah was able to jump in and cover, and we now have that replacement hired as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You guys know how I feel. I&#8217;m just going to keep beating these dead horses of group interviews, having buffer in the schedule, having an on-call person when you&#8217;re able to do that financially \u2014 because it allows you to deal with problems like this and not have to cancel on clients. However, it ate away a ton of our availability. We also have one of our staff members about to have a baby, which is amazing. I can&#8217;t wait for her baby shower \u2014 I will be there in Wisconsin for it, which is really exciting. But that means she&#8217;s going to be out for several months. And I&#8217;m also taking my management team to Vegas in two weeks, so we don&#8217;t really want anybody training during that time. We just want things to be homeostasis. Time is starting to eat away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>All of that to be said, we need to hire right now, ASAP. We already have two accepted offers this week that will help with that problem. We just need to hire one more and we will be golden to keep up with the progress we made in quarter one. The momentum is there, but we are literally hitting that wall right now. So the solution is hire like crazy right now. That&#8217;s what needs to happen. That&#8217;s one of the key takeaways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-3\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Numbers: What&#8217;s Going Right<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> This quarter review just made things so clear as to what was happening and what&#8217;s going right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Number one, our quarter one revenue was $295,000 \u2014 actually, I think it came up to about $300K. That is down 8% from last year&#8217;s $321,000. However, our net income is up 53% from last year. So less revenue and more profit, and I want to explain exactly how that happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the number one reasons is overtime almost disappeared. We had 72 hours of overtime across the team in quarter one of last year. Quarter one of this year, we had under nine hours. That is an 88% reduction in overtime, and it all has to do with one big reason that we&#8217;ll get into.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Number two, the pipeline is incredibly healthy. We had 39 first-time cleans in quarter one. That is the top of our recurring revenue funnel. That is pushing us toward our goal. We have to have first-time cleans in order to add monthly recurring revenue, because they have to have that first time in order to become a recurring client. And if we don&#8217;t have the availability to fit first-time cleans in, we are not going to be able to add monthly recurring revenue \u2014 which is our end goal, that $1,500 a month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>46% of our first-time cleans in quarter one have already converted to recurring clients. Industry benchmarks, as you guys know, are between 40 to 60%. So we are right on track. And some of March&#8217;s are probably going to convert that haven&#8217;t yet, but March just ended, so we won&#8217;t know the full impact for a little while.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the big improvements we implemented in quarter one is follow-up. Previously, a lot of people were falling through the cracks who had first-time cleans \u2014 we were only following up once to get them to recurring status. We have now implemented a process for following up and tracking that. I&#8217;ll give you an example: somebody who had a first-time clean \u2014 we ended up having to email and text her four times before she converted to recurring. Previously she would have just been moved to dead leads or former clients in our process. And that&#8217;s a perfect example of: you guys are not following up enough. And the reason I know that is because I was not. Okay? And if I&#8217;m not, you&#8217;re probably not either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s nothing personal. People are busy, which I already know you know. But even if they&#8217;ve already had one cleaning with us, we still have to just hammer them with follow-up to get them to recurring client status. So we&#8217;re super duper happy about our pipeline from first-time cleans to recurring conversion. Very solid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Another huge win: call-in hours dropped by 355 hours compared to quarter one of last year. That is freaking crazy. You heard me right \u2014 355 hours were called in last year that did not happen this year, in one quarter alone. That&#8217;s wild, and I&#8217;ll explain how that got pretty much completely eradicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>March closed very strong. It was our strongest revenue month of 2026. We have a 13.4% net margin \u2014 and when it comes to margins and revenue and all that stuff, it is highly malleable based on how everybody runs their numbers. Is the owner on salary or not? Just lots of things, right? And this strong month happened despite one to one and a half full days of closure due to crazy weather. We got like 20 inches of snow one day in Wisconsin in March, which is just wild. That&#8217;s thousands of dollars lost that we typically cannot reschedule. People usually just skip in those instances. So that&#8217;s money we lost \u2014 and we still had a great, profitable month despite that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The reason I want to share these wins before I go into the specifics is the only way I can tell you these things is because I&#8217;m tracking them. I can&#8217;t tell you that we&#8217;ve improved drastically on call-outs or on overtime if I don&#8217;t track that. And because of Gusto specifically \u2014 that&#8217;s our payroll software \u2014 that&#8217;s where a lot of this raw data is getting pulled from and then going to Claude. We knew some of these things were better, but we didn&#8217;t realize them until we put it to Claude and said, hey, why is this so much better?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I know you guys get really overwhelmed with tracking, and this may feel a bit high-level or advanced or a little overwhelming. If you&#8217;re in the field all the time, this may feel completely overwhelming. Or if you don&#8217;t have a team yet, this may not even be necessary. But I want to make content for every stage of business. And I apologize if this feels like, my gosh, this is way over where I need to be right now \u2014 but the point is you can come back to this when you&#8217;re ready and start making progress and implementing some of these ideas. I just want this to be there for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-4\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Heart of It: The Hidden Costs of One Bad Account<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> Okay, so this is kind of the heart of the episode that I want to get into \u2014 as to why a lot of these improvements happened and why I&#8217;m, if not happy, at least okay with the fact that we&#8217;re down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In spring of 2025, we brought on and lost a large account \u2014 that private school that I think I&#8217;ve mentioned ad nauseam. I talked a lot about it in my 2025 analysis. That was about $4,700 a month in revenue that we lost, which is a ton. That single account explains roughly $14,300 of the $25,000 year-over-year revenue gap. On paper, obviously that&#8217;s a super painful loss. But in reality, it&#8217;s a positive. Stick with me here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What the quarter one review revealed is three hidden costs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I alluded to the first one: overtime. You&#8217;re probably wondering \u2014 Stephanie, why was so much overtime happening? You&#8217;ve never really talked about overtime being a problem before. And that&#8217;s because it&#8217;s not currently a problem. I didn&#8217;t even realize how much of a problem this was until literally this week. Holy crap, that was costing us a lot of money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Specifically, the only reason we were having so much overtime was because of this account. A lot of cleaners were turning over at that account, so we were having to send Hannah or other managers to go clean it. And they still had to get their other work done, so they were going into overtime. And the most expensive overtime, frankly, is going to be if my managers go into overtime, because they&#8217;re the highest-paid people in the company. When they have to do OT, it&#8217;s costing us a ton of money. We&#8217;re not able to charge extra for that. It&#8217;s also putting a lot of strain on them mentally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Hannah specifically was having to go cover cleans there all the time, short notice, because we just couldn&#8217;t keep the damn thing staffed. So when the account left, so did the overtime. It just fixed itself, basically, by us dropping that account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here&#8217;s the important distinction: we did not get more disciplined related to OT. It&#8217;s just not something that has ever really come up. I didn&#8217;t realize this was a thing until we looked at this data. We removed the thing that was forcing us to be undisciplined with overtime. We were having to push into overtime in order to get this account covered. So all of the profit that we were potentially making there was going right out the drain \u2014 through overtime, and through hidden cost number two: training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We trained approximately four people specifically for that account. It was supposed to be a four to five hour night account. We underbid it significantly. They were fine with us getting done with whatever we could in that amount of time, but that account literally should have been at more like eight to nine hours a night in order to actually get the whole school done. It was a massive school. When we bid it, school was not in session. It was a private special needs school, and the condition of the school was very messy, as all schools I&#8217;m imagining are. We would come in and there would be just so much picking up. We had never cleaned a school before, frankly, and we just underbid it. Huge lesson learned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They were happy with what we were getting done every night, but the cleaners were freaking out. Every single one of them was like, this is overwhelming, I want to cry, I feel like a failure every single day because I&#8217;m only getting a small chunk of this school done. There were four levels to the school. We just underbid it. It is what it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So four people \u2014 we paid to train them, all four of them dropped. At an estimated $1,500 to $2,000 per failed hire, that&#8217;s potentially $6,000 to $10,000 in training costs tied to this one single client that we did not make back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And here&#8217;s the part that really got me about this: none of that ever appeared as a line item. I don&#8217;t actually know how much that training cost us. I&#8217;m guesstimating. This is one of the areas of improvement that this data analysis has highlighted \u2014 we don&#8217;t know how much it costs us to train somebody because it&#8217;s just buried in payroll.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When we pay somebody when they come on, we have line items in Gusto for their drive time at a separate rate, all their reimbursements, gas mileage, stipends. Those are all broken apart. But when they come on, it&#8217;s just: here&#8217;s your hourly rate and here is your drive time. For us to track what is uncharged time to the client, that is very difficult, and there&#8217;s no easy way to do it because we&#8217;ve never put something in place to make it easy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-5\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">A New Way to Track Training Costs<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> So this is one of the key improvements we are about to start doing immediately. We have added a training line item into Gusto that doesn&#8217;t affect the staff member at all \u2014 their paycheck is going to stay the same. This is strictly for us to be able to report. What&#8217;s going to happen is when somebody is training and we are not making any money off of them, we are going to put those hours into that line item on their pay stubs so that when we run a report, we can see how much that person cost us in training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We&#8217;re also going to use that training category when the trainer is costing us money and not bringing any in. For example, the first week of training is in control homes \u2014 those are my manager&#8217;s houses. We&#8217;re not bringing in any income, so her hours are also going to be categorized as training so that we can see how much it costs us holistically from a trainer and trainee perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But in week two of training, they&#8217;re going to be with a trainer who&#8217;s bringing in money. We&#8217;re going to be charging for the trainer&#8217;s time but not the trainee&#8217;s time. So in that second week, the trainer&#8217;s time is not going to be assigned to that training category in Gusto, but the trainee will continue until we&#8217;re actually able to make money off of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you charge flat rate, this may get a little more complicated. I just want to caveat \u2014 we charge hourly. There are ways you could do this if you charge flat rate, because if your appointment time is not getting cut in half, you&#8217;re still paying for that training. Your effective rate is going down by hour, technically \u2014 you&#8217;re just not changing it to the client. So you&#8217;re eating that cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is important because I&#8217;ve been in business for seven years and I cannot tell you right now how much the average person costs me to get them through training. And why this information is important is so that we can know at what point we&#8217;re breaking even on a new hire. We pay all this money upfront \u2014 let&#8217;s say it is $2,000. I don&#8217;t know what it&#8217;s going to be. We&#8217;ll find out. Stay tuned to another episode and I will tell you what this number is, because we&#8217;re about to have multiple people go through training and I&#8217;m going to know it, and I&#8217;m super excited to find out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because then we can see: at what point does this person break even? And what I mean is, they pay themselves off. Obviously I know when we start charging for that new hire&#8217;s time, we&#8217;re putting them on paying customers&#8217; appointments, they&#8217;re doing the appointments by themselves \u2014 we start making money off of them then. But if I don&#8217;t know how much they cost us, I don&#8217;t know at which point we&#8217;re breaking even. Because it&#8217;s not the day they start cleaning paying clients&#8217; houses. We break even when the amount of paying clients they&#8217;ve done offsets the investment of training them. I&#8217;m going to know exactly what those dollar amounts are and exactly at which point that happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then we can see \u2014 can we improve that? We can also see if somebody is clearly not a good fit because we&#8217;re having to extend training. It&#8217;s going to eradicate a lot of guesstimating and it&#8217;s going to really empower us. And it&#8217;s also going to be able to tell us: okay, we&#8217;ve had to turn over multiple cleaners on this one account. This account cost us a lot in training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A lot of you maybe already track this and you&#8217;re like, geez, Stephanie, you&#8217;re not doing that? I&#8217;m going to share it with you guys because I don&#8217;t know it all, obviously. This happens literally every quarter, every month now \u2014 shit, didn&#8217;t think about that. And it&#8217;s because of the data and because of the analysis of that data that is highlighting really interesting information and allowing us to improve. We didn&#8217;t realize so many first-time cleans were not converting, so we did something about that. But we can&#8217;t do something about it until we know about it. We can&#8217;t put a process into place until we understand what the problem is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So the lesson related to all of this: some accounts cost you more than they pay you, and you can&#8217;t see the full bill until they&#8217;re gone. If your cleaners keep cycling out of one specific account, that&#8217;s not a people problem. It might be an account problem. It might be a bidding or timing problem. You need to dig into what the heck is going on and not just say, people suck. Maybe there is something to this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-6\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Where We Actually Stand<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> So I want to talk about where we actually stand right now. The revenue gap \u2014 that $25,000 \u2014 is structural and explainable. It&#8217;s not a mystery. It&#8217;s not a crisis. One lost account accounts for that $14,000. And then the majority of the rest of that difference is specifically because of other commercial accounts that we lost later in the year \u2014 in quarter two and quarter three of last year, we lost two other commercial accounts that pretty much added up to what we had in quarter one of 2025 that we no longer have. They canceled later in the year. So it is explainable. It sucks, but it is explainable in very easy terms. This is why we&#8217;re down. It&#8217;s not some mystery. And so we just have to build back up, which is exactly what we&#8217;re doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because I was feeling really shitty at the end of last year, frankly, looking at the numbers and being like, look how far we&#8217;ve fallen. I was feeling really sorry for myself in a lot of ways. And it&#8217;s like the only thing that is actually going to move the needle is having a reasonable goal. I looked at where I want us to be at the end of 2026 \u2014 as you guys know, it is to have our monthly recurring revenue hit $125,000 a month by December of 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In order to make that happen, I need to be adding $1,500 a month in monthly recurring revenue. And then I break that down by how many first-time cleans that requires. That makes it really clear: okay, what is stopping us from making these first-time cleans happen and then converting them to monthly recurring revenue? Well, we didn&#8217;t have enough follow-up and we didn&#8217;t have enough availability in the schedule to fit in those first-time cleans. That makes it very actionable as to what needs to happen to hit this big lofty goal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because if I just said we&#8217;ve gotta be at $125K by the end of the year, make it happen \u2014 that&#8217;s one thing. But I&#8217;m actually laying out exactly the process. And we&#8217;re learning along the way as to what it&#8217;s actually going to take to hit this big lofty goal that is attainable. It can be done. We have hit that before. It&#8217;s been a couple years since we&#8217;ve hit it, but we did hit it in 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think, honestly, why the business has shrunk is because it had to in order for us to realize the areas that need to be fixed. Whether that&#8217;s true or not, that&#8217;s how I&#8217;m framing it in my mind to stay positive \u2014 we had to shrink some in order to fix these problems and grow and scale in the right way. Because we needed to add all of these things and these structures in place in order to keep growing and for it not to fall apart again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-7\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">We&#8217;re Capacity Constrained, Not Lead Constrained<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> And what I mentioned at the beginning of this episode is we&#8217;re hitting that wall now. In April, we are running out of availability. We have almost no availability to do first-time cleans. We need to hire way more than we thought, which is crazy because in February we had so much availability. The reason we were able to fit so many first-time cleans in was that we had so much availability because of the call-outs drop \u2014 I&#8217;ll talk about that shortly. But it&#8217;s making us want to catch it now so we don&#8217;t have a repeat, because the repeat of last year was that April is when everything really fell to shit. I don&#8217;t want that to happen again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And it&#8217;s going to happen again if we are not able to fit first-time cleans in. We&#8217;re simply not going to hit our goal. It&#8217;s not just the first-time cleans we have to fit in \u2014 we have to continually keep adding availability to keep up with those people fitting into recurring schedules. Because if they go to recurring, that eats up another four or five hours a week or every other week, whatever their frequency is. It&#8217;s kind of like this culminating effect of we have to stay on top of this availability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So all of that to be said: we are capacity constrained. It&#8217;s not lead constrained. Our close rate has been pretty consistent at about 30%, which is definitely lower than what&#8217;s recommended in our industry. However, I&#8217;m pleased with that because we did do that price increase. We upped our first-time and sporadic cleans to $60 an hour, and I was really scared to do that. It did not affect our close rate at all. It stayed the same. That is very, very reassuring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Our leads have gone up pretty drastically. In March, we had 49 leads. Last year in March, we had 28 leads. We literally had darn near double the leads, which is excellent. And just in general, leads compared to quarter one \u2014 January 2025, we had 25 leads; this year we had 22. February of last year we had 26 leads; this year we had 30. March of last year, 28; this year, 49. Significantly more leads than last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We also closed about the same number of clients. Our close rate was actually slightly lower from a percentage, but we closed the same amount of clients just because we had more leads. Close rate is something to always watch, of course. But it doesn&#8217;t tell the whole picture because every single one of those clients has a different amount of money associated with them. We closed our largest commercial account since last year this quarter, which made a huge jump in monthly recurring revenue. Not every lead is equal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Right now we&#8217;re telling people we don&#8217;t have availability \u2014 especially move-outs, big move-ins. The dates they&#8217;re wanting, we just don&#8217;t have. So hiring is now the constraint again. That&#8217;s what&#8217;s holding us back from closing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-8\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Price Increases: The Data<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> I also want to note that we did price increases across the board in a lot of areas of the business. Among the 185 clients in both Q1 of last year and Q1 of this year, 98 clients are paying more. The total increase is $22,573 more from the same customers. That&#8217;s significant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>59 clients are paying less \u2014 a total decrease of $14,730. That&#8217;s going to be because of frequency reductions, and it&#8217;s why tracking MRR change is so vital. Not just when we lose a client, but when they reduce work or scope. Net from retained clients, we have $7,800 net more. Average retained client revenue is up 3.1%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Breaking down the 98 clients with increases: 55 clients were up 1 to 15%, 21 clients were up 15 to 35%, and 22 clients are up 35% or more. That last group would be price increase combined with expanded scope \u2014 it&#8217;s not like they had the same amount of work and we increased them 35%. They added work, which happens with many clients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So yes, 98 clients of ours are paying more than they did last year, and obviously we are bringing in new clients at a higher rate. I just want to highlight that because it has been very, very successful and is also helping balance out the drops we&#8217;ve experienced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is why it&#8217;s so important to be comparing to last month, to be comparing to last year, and seeing where your current clients are. It will also help you showcase which clients have not had a price increase. And it doesn&#8217;t mean everybody has to. I know some folks say do price increases across the board, no matter what, on every single client. We don&#8217;t do that. I&#8217;m kind of in the mindset of pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered when it comes to price increases. If we&#8217;re making $55 to $60 an hour on a commercial account, we&#8217;re probably not going to increase them because I&#8217;m like, they&#8217;re good. I&#8217;m not trying to make them go shop around. I&#8217;m happy with those margins. They can stay. But we will now call it out: hey, you&#8217;re not getting a price increase this year \u2014 where previously it just would have gone unsaid. So we want to call out: hey, you&#8217;re not having a price increase this year, yay you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-9\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">355 Hours of Call-Outs That Didn&#8217;t Happen<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> One of the main reasons we were able to accomplish what we did in quarter one of this year is because our team actually showed up. As I said at the beginning, our call-in hours dropped 355 hours compared to quarter one of last year. That is a massive number of call-outs that we did not have to deal with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You may be thinking, my gosh, Stephanie, don&#8217;t you have an attendance policy? Yeah \u2014 and when shit was hitting the fan, if we called them out on everything, we would have had to fire everybody, it felt like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I looked at why this change happened. The answer was not what I expected. Did we start holding people more accountable? No. Did we implement some brilliant new accountability system? No. Did we have a come-to-Jesus meeting that turned everything around? No. The problem largely walked out the door on its own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In quarter one of 2025, we had 16 employees with 20 or more call-in hours. Of those 16 people, 11 are no longer with the company. Natural attrition \u2014 they left for their own reasons over time, and the call-in problem went with them. That is not necessarily management in the traditional sense, but it is important to call out for cleaning businesses: sometimes the team gets healthier not because you fixed something, but because the people who were not a fit eventually moved on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Not that they were bad people \u2014 but the quality of their attendance, we just had overarchingly, on average, folks who called in a lot more. Now we don&#8217;t. Most of the people with the highest call-outs are gone. Three quarters of those people who were leading to this giant call-out problem are gone. Some got fired, most quit for whatever reasons. They just weren&#8217;t a good fit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And it also made me realize: all of those people who quit, they were calling in a ton beforehand. That is a clear red flag. If somebody is having attendance issues, watch the numbers \u2014 it&#8217;s telling you they&#8217;re most likely going to quit. Doesn&#8217;t mean they can&#8217;t turn it around. We had several folks who completely did a 180.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I also want to highlight: people go through health issues. Some of my longest-term staff members who have higher call-out rates in comparison to everybody else \u2014 they&#8217;re going through stuff. We give that leeway. You have to make the decision as to what that line is for you and your company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-10\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">How to Track This in Your Business<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> If you&#8217;re like, how do I track this, Stephanie? We do it in our payroll software. Whatever payroll software you use, there should be a way to track when somebody calls out. It&#8217;s not the time-off request \u2014 that&#8217;s a separate thing, that&#8217;s approved time off. An unexpected call-out, we track in that employee&#8217;s profile, and then we can run a report and see how much they called out. And then we can give that to AI and compare it to previous years, previous months. Even run this on a monthly or weekly basis, whatever makes sense for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A lot of times we don&#8217;t realize these patterns, especially if everything is happening over text and you&#8217;re just not able to see it. You&#8217;re just like, I feel like they&#8217;re calling out a lot, I feel like they&#8217;re missing a ton of work \u2014 but you don&#8217;t have the actual quantifiable data and you&#8217;re not able to compare them to where they were or where everybody else in the company is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For us right now, two people on our active team have some pretty significant call-outs. One is trending worse, not better. We&#8217;re aware of it and we&#8217;re able to clock it and have a conversation. Two people had complete turnarounds \u2014 one went from 44 call-in hours in quarter one of last year to under one hour this quarter. That&#8217;s crazy. I think that had to do with a lot better planning on her part, just requesting time off rather than calling out same-day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it&#8217;s not that the problem fully solved itself. It&#8217;s that the bulk of it resolved through people leaving, and what&#8217;s left is very manageable and specific. That&#8217;s the main reason I was like, how are we fitting all this in with a team this small right now? It&#8217;s because we had to have a bigger team last year to fit the same amount of hours in because people were calling out so much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And it also just in general feels less chaotic. Every time somebody calls out, you have to rearrange the schedule. When we had 355 more hours of call-outs to deal with on the fly \u2014 or cancel on clients \u2014 that&#8217;s a huge stressor. The management team just in general feels a lot less stressed compared to last year. Not even close.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you have a chronic attendance problem and you can&#8217;t figure out how to fix it, look at who&#8217;s driving it. It might be two or three specific people, not a cultural problem. And sometimes if you&#8217;ve built the right environment, that resolves itself \u2014 but not always. Sometimes the answer isn&#8217;t a new policy. It&#8217;s patience, a hiring filter, and for us it&#8217;s going to be clocking when they&#8217;re having these attendance problems and stepping in to have conversations way faster. Because a lot of times it feels like hindsight: yeah, they did call out a lot and then they quit. Well, yeah. So if they&#8217;re calling out a lot, step in, have a conversation. They might be able to turn it around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A lot of times they don&#8217;t even realize how much they&#8217;re calling out. If you give them the data and say, look, this is how much you&#8217;ve called out this month \u2014 that&#8217;s not acceptable. What do we need to do? Do you need to go down to four days instead of five? Three days for the time being? What needs to happen in order for you to have proper attendance so that we can plan and not be running around with our heads cut off?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-11\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">What the P&amp;L Review Revealed<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> This analysis also went through and looked at all of our P&amp;Ls \u2014 our profit and loss statements from this quarter versus quarter one of last year \u2014 and it highlighted any areas where we improved costs. For example, we spent 25% less on supplies this quarter compared to last year&#8217;s first quarter. And obviously I was like, why? What did we save money on? It allows you to get curious and pull that string.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In this case, it mostly had to do with the fact that in quarter one of last year, we were setting up our La Crosse office \u2014 we had moved offices there, and there were a lot of one-time expenses that happened in Q1 of last year related to that. So it really wasn&#8217;t that we&#8217;re saving money this year; it&#8217;s that last year&#8217;s Q1 was just higher than normal. But now I know that. It&#8217;s not some mystery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Insurance expenses \u2014 that&#8217;s a huge area where we improved. We shopped around for insurance carriers and switched, and that saved us thousands and thousands of dollars. That&#8217;s a huge part of why our profit went up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The analysis also highlighted that we need to do a subscription audit. My payroll and accounts manager has already done one in April because our subscription costs went up this year compared to last year. We ran through and highlighted a couple of things we need to cancel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m just mentioning these things at the end to give you an idea of what this kind of data analysis can do for you when you give it enough information. And for you guys thinking, I don&#8217;t even do a P&amp;L, I don&#8217;t even categorize my stuff \u2014 that happens a lot with me too. There&#8217;s always a moment of, crap, we don&#8217;t track this. Don&#8217;t feel bad. This is continual improvement. Use this as inspiration, not a shaming thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Sometimes you&#8217;re going to have to go slog through things for the past year or the past month \u2014 just start. For the training line item, we&#8217;re not going to go back and recategorize training hours on previous pay stubs. We&#8217;re starting now. Just like prior to this year, we did not categorize our invoices by type \u2014 commercial, residential, weekly, frequency. We didn&#8217;t do that before, and we&#8217;re not going to backlog all of last year. You don&#8217;t always have to go back to the beginning of time when you add a new metric you want to track. Just start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And when you start doing this data analysis, it&#8217;s going to highlight areas that you&#8217;re still blind on, that you&#8217;re not tracking. Don&#8217;t feel bad. That&#8217;s what we&#8217;re doing here. We&#8217;re improving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-12\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Going Into Q2: Hiring, Indeed, and Flat Rate<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stephanie:<\/strong> One of the improvements we&#8217;re going to be making is spending a lot more on Indeed. We were only spending about $400 a month, and I realized that might be one of the things holding us back. If we can&#8217;t hire, that&#8217;s what&#8217;s stopping us from hitting our goals. And Indeed is cracking down on all the free methods we used to go about things. If you&#8217;ve watched my group interview video or any of my hiring-related content over the past several years, it&#8217;s not accurate specifically when it comes to Indeed \u2014 I used to say we hadn&#8217;t had to pay on Indeed because previously we would just make copies of listings and have multiple listings in similar areas for the same kind of job. They&#8217;re not letting you do that for free anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Crystal was only able to boost and sponsor a listing in the Sparta area, but we&#8217;re serving and hiring from multiple towns. So we need to show up in more places. It&#8217;s like, okay, we need to spend more money then. I told her: spend up to $2,000 a month. Crank it up and see what happens. I know that might sound like a crazy amount of money \u2014 I understand that. But for our size of business, if the biggest thing stopping us from hitting our financial goals is that we don&#8217;t have availability and we need staff and we&#8217;re not getting enough people applying through our current methods, let me do this experiment. Let&#8217;s do it for a month and see what happens. If we can get two good hires out of it, you know how much money those two good hires are going to bring into the business? It is worth it. We&#8217;re treating it as a line item \u2014 recruiting costs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I saw right in front of me after Wednesday: we are about to hit the wall. We&#8217;re about to potentially repeat where all of a sudden we&#8217;re coming into busy season, so many leads are coming in, and we can&#8217;t fit them all in. They&#8217;re saying yes and we can&#8217;t say yes back. I do not want that. That&#8217;s what&#8217;s going to stop us from hitting our goals. So we need to bring people in. We&#8217;re being as discerning as possible \u2014 we&#8217;re doing the group interview and then a second interview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>All of that to be said, I&#8217;m feeling really good going into quarter two. I am so excited to go to Las Vegas \u2014 I&#8217;m actually taking my managers to the scaling workshop that the Hormozis at Acquisition.com put on. It&#8217;s definitely a pretty penny, it is expensive. If you&#8217;re interested, I&#8217;ll be happy to share my takeaways on what we learn and what we implement from that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m also doing a consulting call with Molly Moran next week. My management team and I are going to discuss what a hypothetical transition to flat rate, or partial flat rate for residential, would look like. Because I just want to keep learning. I want to never think I know it all because I don&#8217;t. There are businesses far, far ahead of ours, and it would be foolish not to keep learning and exposing ourselves to new ideas and experimenting and seeing what works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Structurally speaking, the business is so much healthier than it was last year despite the lower revenue. I&#8217;m feeling really confident and we just have so much clarity going into quarter two. I highly recommend you guys implement some data analysis into your business. Hopefully this sparked some ideas for you, and I will just continue sharing what I learn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you want me to do this on a quarterly basis, let me know down in the comments if you like these reviews and I will continue to do them. I&#8217;m also doing it on a monthly basis \u2014 but I&#8217;ll probably just pick and choose from those, because those might just be individual lessons that can become their own episode. Let me know if you guys like this type of topic and if I have any fellow data nerds out there. Put a calculator emoji down below if you made it all the way through. Join the ZenMaid Mastermind if you&#8217;re not over there already. And subscribe to the newsletter \u2014 great stuff put out by Amar and Nicole on the ZenMaid team. You don&#8217;t have to be a ZenMaid customer to read it. Please hit like and subscribe here. If you&#8217;re listening on Spotify, we would love a review and a rating because that allows other owners to find the podcast so that they can learn and grow too. Hope you&#8217;re having a fantastic April, and catch you later, guys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"heading-13\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Resources Mentioned<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=R-GpAnCO2nM\">Filthy Rich Cleaners Ep. 103<\/a> \u2014 Stephanie&#8217;s full 2025 year-end financial review<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/zenmaid.lpages.co\/newsletter-sign-up\/\">Subscribe to ZenMaid&#8217;s weekly newsletter<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/groups\/zenmaidmastermind\">ZenMaid Mastermind<\/a> \u2014 Free Facebook group for cleaning business owners<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/get.zenmaid.com\">ZenMaid (cleaning business scheduling software)<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n    <div class=\"zm-quick-tip d-flex flex-column flex-md-row mb-24 mt-24\">\n        <div class=\"zm-quick-tip-content-wrapper\">\n            <h4 class=\"zm-quick-tip-title mb-12 text-dark2\">QUICK TIP FROM THE AUTHOR<\/h4>\n            <div class=\"zm-quick-tip-image d-block d-md-none\">\n                <img decoding=\"async\" width=\"200px\" src=\"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-content\/themes\/zm-theme\/assets\/cta_images\/zm_trial_cta.png\" alt=\"quick-tip-image\">\n            <\/div>\n            <h5 class=\"zm-quick-tip-sub-title mb-12\">Simplify and enjoy your scheduling with a scheduling software made for maid services<\/h5>\n            <div>\n                <ul>\n                    <li>Have a beautiful calendar that's full but never stressful.<\/li>\n                    <li>Make your cleaners happy and provide all the information they need at their fingertips.<\/li>\n                    <li>Convert more website visitors into leads and get new cleanings in your inbox with high-converting booking forms.<\/li>\n                    <li>Become part of a community of 8000+ cheering maid service owners just like you.<\/li>\n                <\/ul>\n                <p>Start your FREE ZenMaid trial today and discover the freedom and clarity that ZenMaid can bring to your maid service! <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/app.zenmaid.com\/sign-up\">Start your FREE trial today<\/a><\/p>\n            <\/div>\n        <\/div>\n        <div class=\"zm-quick-tip-image d-none d-md-block\">\n            <img decoding=\"async\" width=\"200px\" src=\"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-content\/themes\/zm-theme\/assets\/cta_images\/zm_trial_cta.png\" alt=\"quick-tip-image\">\n        <\/div>\n    <\/div>\n\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Listen on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube Introduction Stephanie: Hello everyone, welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host Stephanie from Serene Clean, and I am so excited about this week&#8217;s solo episode because we are going to be going into my quarter one \u2014 am I from Boston? [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":17247,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"A $25K Revenue Drop Made Us More Profitable?! What My Q1 Review Taught Me About My Business","_seopress_titles_desc":"In this episode of Filthy Rich Cleaners, Stephanie opens her Q1 books live and explains why revenue is down $25K, but profit is up 53%.","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-17243","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-podcast"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17243"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17249,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17243\/revisions\/17249"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenmaid.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}